Restoration Druid: Midnight Expansion Preview

Restoration received a near-complete overhaul in Midnight, with many heal over time effects like Spring Blossoms and Cultivation removed and our major cooldown, Flourish completely reworked.

A core concept they're pushing in Midnight is a move from the current cooldown-heavy environment to a more sustained healing pattern. As a result, most healing specs, including ours, have received heavy cooldown nerfs across the board. For us, this has taken place in a few different ways:

• Flourish is now passive
  Previously, Flourish was a powerful one minute cooldown that extended your heal over time effects and made them tick faster for a while. In Midnight this HoT extension mechanic is preserved, but Flourish is no longer an active button and is instead an extra effect attached to Tranquility casts. The extension is also much longer now but it loses the HoT tick speed portion of its effect. The end result is that the new passive Flourish is far stronger but available much less often.
• Wildwood Roots removed
  Another primary driver of our ramp power in the War Within was Wildwood Roots which made our Regrowth casts extremely fast. This has been removed entirely.

Another Midnight objective is to make specs easier to play by removing a multitude of different buffs and interactions. This has affected Restoration in two keys ways: the removal of many heal over time effects, and a few active buttons getting converted to passives. Here are some of the big highlights:

• Grove Guardians now spawn passively when you cast Swiftmend or Wild Growth.
• Active buttons Cenarion Ward, Overgrowth and Invigorate removed.
• Mastery value increased by a lot but several heal over time effects removed including: Spring Blossoms, Cultivation, and Cenarion Ward, Grove Tending, and the HoT-portion of Tranquility.
• Several interactions simplified: Soul of the Forest and Power of the Archdruid now proc together instead of the latter being tied to Wild Growth.
• Skull Bash removed from the class tree for Restoration. Note that all healing specs except Restoration Shaman lost their interrupt so this isn't a Restoration-specific change.

In addition to our Apex talent, we get a few new talents that replace the ones removed. A lot of these are fairly plain healing increases to specific spells like Improved Swiftmend or Intensity while a few others have gameplay implications:

New talent: Nature's Bounty. This "cleave" addition to Regrowth could prove very interesting for a newer rendition of our Abundance playstyle.

New talent: Lifetreading. This talent makes your Efflorescence automatically move every few seconds to where your Lifebloom target is. It save you quite a lot of mana since you don't need to pay for Efflorescence anymore. It'll also simplify your rotation by cutting a major uptime spell.

Apex talents are a new addition in Midnight. They're a special type of spec-tree talent that you can put up to four points in. Ours is called Everbloom, and it focuses on Lifebloom. They are technically optional in that you could put those four points somewhere else, but expect Blizzard to make them strong.

1. Everbloom (1 pt)
   Lifebloom stacks every 5 seconds, stacking up to 3 times. Each stack increases the healing done, but you still only get the one Mastery stack.
2. Everbloom (2 pts)
   Causes your Lifebloom to splash 15/30% of its healing to two nearby allies. This includes both the Lifebloom HoT-portion and "Bloom"-portion. Each tick or bloom can pick unique targets. It'll avoid uninjured targets if possible.
3. Everbloom (1 pt)
   When you consume Soul of the Forest, your Lifebloom blooms 5 times in rapid succession. Each of these also cleave to two nearby allies.

Lifebloom was an interesting choice for our Apex talent since while it has been a Restoration Druid staple for a long time, it's much less integrated into our gameplay loop than other spells like Rejuvenation and Regrowth. The talent does make a target of your choice effectively immortal outside of one-shot mechanics - five extra blooms every fifteen seconds or so is a lot of healing. It should also do decent HPS overall via its cleave effect. Not a game changer, but should be powerful enough and picking a squishy target like a Moonkin to pour healing into is generally quite useful. Should be particularly strong in Mythic+ where you end up cleaving healing to most of the group.

The changes to our hero trees in Midnight are not major. We get three new talents for each, and a little simplification to talents that conferred buffs in the War Within.

• Simplified: Strategic Infusion now passively causes your heal-over-time effects to have a 4% increased chance to critically heal (was a buff for 10 seconds when you cast Regrowth).
• Simplified? Symbiotic Blooms no longer appear on your party or raid frames. This is an odd change since Symbiotic Blooms is by far our most powerful heal-over-time effect and should definitely be included on frames.
• New Hero Talent: Green Thumb. Symbiotic Blooms growth rate increased 20%. Previously part of our Season 3 tier set and quite a good talent.
• New Hero Talent: Rampancy. Another former tier set converted to a talent. There's no real gameplay here but it's a good amount of extra healing.
• New Hero Talent: Patient Custodian. Another minor passive bonus - increases our heal-over-time effects by 6%. It's just fine.

• Simplified: Dream Surge. No longer a buff on yourself - is now just a passive AoE heal when Grove Guardians are summoned. Also quite a lot less powerful than before.
• Redesigned: Cenarius' Might. Now just increases Swiftmend healing by 20% instead of giving you a haste buff on cast. Both weaker and much more simple than before.
• Redesigned: Durability of Nature. Now passively increases Grove Guardian duration instead of putting out mini Cenarion Ward buffs. The former talent never saw any play anyway.
• Redesigned: Early Spring. Now reduces the cooldown of Wild Growth and Swiftmend by 1 second instead of reducing the cooldown on Grove Guardians (since they are no longer an active spells). Swiftmend is very powerful in Midnight so even a second off should be a decent bonus.
• New Hero Talent: Sylvan Beckoning. Your periodic spells have a chance to summon a Dryad that'll cast a mini Tranquility and Regrowth. Rather overwrought for a small passive healing increase.
• New Hero Talent: Spirit of the Thicket. Ironbark summons a Dryad that heals your target for a lot over 6 seconds. Your Ironbark target is usually already quite safe so we'll consider this a fine but unexceptional talent.
• New Hero Talent: Dryad's Dance. Dryads from the above two talents cause Swiftmend to cool down 25% faster. Your Dryad uptime won't be great and one of them is a little RNG but this could still be quite powerful if healing is as sustained as promised.